


anyone to utter now

by cynical_optimist



Category: Lovely Little Losers
Genre: Angst, Character Study, Family Issues, M/M, canon is somewhat ignored, look i just really love vegan fred
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-08
Updated: 2015-12-08
Packaged: 2018-05-05 14:23:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,375
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5378408
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cynical_optimist/pseuds/cynical_optimist
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When he is fifteen, he is given his first ever real shift behind the counter. He is nervous, hands shaking despite his best efforts, but Fred puts on his brightest smile and pretends he’s just clumsy.</p><p> </p><p>A character study of Fred Boyet.</p>
            </blockquote>





	anyone to utter now

**Author's Note:**

> I love this character very much and when I love characters I cause them pain. Enjoy! x
> 
> This was edited by [Sarah](http://www.douchenuts.tumblr.com); again, thank you.
> 
>  
> 
> Title from "Happiness is Helping Others" by John Leroy Maxwell.

Boyet’s, Fred’s parents have always told him, has one goal: to make people happy.

“Well, too make money, too,” his mother amends, once. “But that’s not so important.”

That makes sense to him. It’s always been there, in his earliest memories—the all-encompassing warmth, the quiet bustle of the patrons, the coffee machines running in the background. He remembers firm hands catching him when he’s still learning to be steady on his feet. He remembers sitting in front of the oven for exactly twenty-six minutes, because his father finally let him help him with the banana bread and he wanted it to turn out perfectly. The café has always made him happy, at least.

When he is fifteen, he is given his first ever real shift behind the counter. He is nervous, hands shaking despite his best efforts, but Fred puts on his brightest smile and pretends he’s just clumsy.

He messes up three orders that day, and two of them are gracious enough to shake their heads good-naturedly and wait for their correct orders before returning to their usual seats. The other snaps at him, and he spends the rest of his shift with his throat clenched tight, hoping his glasses don’t fog up. Fred still smiles at her, because it was his fault and she was probably having a bad day, anyway.

Zeb tells him he needs to toughen up, when he hears about it.

“You’ll never survive past year thirteen like that,” he says, somewhat scornfully, but he just doesn’t understand.

Fred shrugs, and doesn’t tell him that he isn’t going to follow his advice. He doesn’t tell Zeb much, but he always figures it out anyway. Fred’s pretty sure he knows all his secrets.

He knows, somehow, that his parents have been filling out paperwork that has nothing to do with the café, that his mother has been spending the last few months in a completely different residence. He knows that Fred enjoys music more than anything else, but that he’s going to study business. He probably even knows about the crush Fred had on him when he was thirteen. Zeb hasn’t told anyone anything, though, and for that he is probably the best friend he could ever ask for. Fred tries to show his gratitude by not charging him for his ridiculously complex coffees, but he’d probably do that anyway so the gesture is rather redundant.

Fred does it for a lot of people, actually, even though he knows it makes the lines around his mother’s eyes deepen.

“We can’t just give everything away for nothing,” she sighs, after catching him doing it for the tenth time, and he hates disappointing her. Isn’t it worth it though, the gratitude on someone’s face when they don’t have to spend their last few dollars to keep awake through the day?

“I’m sorry,” Fred replies, and he doesn’t say, _But I can’t stop_.

“I know you are,” she replies. “And I love that you care so much.” Kissing him on the forehead, she starts heading out of the café. He sees her wince as a customer greets her as Mrs Boyet, sees it smooth into a forced smile.

When he is nineteen and living in one of his parents’ apartments, he meets Rosa Jones. She is sharp and funny and walks up to the counter at Boyet’s to ask him to help her with a song, because she’d heard from Paige who heard from Vi who heard from Zeb that he was the top of music in year thirteen.

“I’m not even studying music,” he says, taking an assessing look at the line forming behind her. “Don’t you want to ask someone who is?”

She shrugs. “Pissed some of them off a little while ago,” she says callously. “I trust your friends’ judgement. So, you in?” She hesitates, then, “Please?”

Fred is busy, so busy, with three essays due that week and an exam in five days, but he nods. “Okay, he says.

She grins. “I’ll just have a large latte, then. Rosa Jones, by the way. It’s lovely to meet you.”

“You, too,” he says automatically, and moves onto the next customer before it quite sinks in that he’d just done that. Zeb would tell him he needs to learn to say no, but really, it’s not as if he can just turn her down now.

He barely passes the exam, but he does well on all the assignments and gets a new friend out of it. She gives him her number and email, and he promises to keep in touch while she’s globetrotting. That’s the point anyway, isn’t it? It’s about the people, their happiness and their needs and their wants.

A few days after Rosa leaves, Fred’s father starts smiling again, and he really wants to be happy for him. His new partner is nice, of course, and always smiles at Fred when they see each other, but Fred can’t remember the last time he saw his mother truly happy. It’s not fair for him to think that, he knows, not fair to decide that one person cannot be happy without another, but she still balances the books for the café. People have stopped calling her Mrs Boyet—many have stopped calling her at all. Still she smiles, and it is so fake that it hurts him, but he cannot confront her about masks without being a hypocrite of the worst kind.

Fred’s hands have stopped shaking when he talks to customers, but  sometimes his easy cheer is so, so hard. He knows what it means to wear a mask.

When he is twenty, his father sits him down in the back room of the café. “I’m moving,” he says. “Your mother”—it is always this now, never Julie or any other pet name he has ever used—“is in charge until you get your degree, and then the shop is yours.”

He doesn’t know what to say, how to respond, because he has always known that he would take over someday, but never when. “I…” Fred says, and looks down at the mug of coffee he had made himself before his father had dragged him back.

“You’re ready,” he assures him, as if that is the issue. “You have grown into a charming and responsible young man, and I trust you with care of the shop.”

 _What if I’m not ready?_ Fred thinks, and banishes the thought a moment later.

His father stands, walking around the table and enveloping him in a warm hug, and Fred lets himself sink into it. “Okay,” he whispers into his father’s shoulder, and hopes he doesn’t notice him trembling. “Thank you.”

When he finally lets him go, his father nods, smiles, and ruffles his hair before he walks back into the shop. Fred breathes in and lets the breath go only when he feels he cannot hold it anymore, and repeats the process until he’s calmer. He smiles, and it stretches the corners of his mouth uncomfortably. He has a barista to train and customers to cater to, and he cannot afford to be anything but happy.

A few months later, his birthday come and gone with a surprise party at Boyet’s and a postcard from his father, a new face turns up at open mic nights. Not that they don’t ever get new faces, but it’s rarely in the middle of the year that they come, and this one—well, he accidentally drops a cup while he’s making a coffee, something he hasn’t done since he was seventeen. He hears him introduce himself before he begins his set—something beginning with a B, he thinks—but he’s trying to get an order from a very quiet customer and he misses it. By the time he finishes, Fred is on his break and he misses him ordering a coffee.

He forgets about him for a bit, concerned with uni and the café and keeping his mother’s smile on her face. He turns up again though, joking around with Paige and Kitso and other customers, and Fred wants to introduce himself, too.

He is not a teenager with a crush. Well, except he is, and Zeb laughs at him for it for almost twenty minutes.

“Just talk to him,” he urges.

Fred groans, pushing his glasses up to rub his eyes. “There’s always something to do,” he says. “I’m constantly busy with something or another.”

“Not so busy that you can’t talk to your crush.”

Fred vows never to speak to Zeb again, but he still has his usual ready when he turns up at the café the next day.

Rosa isn’t any help either.

 _You’re an idiot_ , she emails him back. _Please don’t ever talk to him, I’ll never hear the end of it. Also, I’ll be back in town in a few weeks, so make sure you’re stocking up on those delicious brownies._

His uni workload suddenly increases then, and he can take barely any shifts at the café, and he still hasn’t found out the name of the musician. He hears snippets, sometimes, as he ducks in and out to get what he needs, bits and pieces of sad love songs and lyrics that the musician’s voice catches on. Then Rosa comes back, but he barely even has time to spend with her, in the midst of everything, and he ends up having to hire a new barista as Boyet’s grows more popular. She’s a friend of Kitso, one of the other baristas, and Rosa knows her, so he shows her the ropes while mentally revising for his next exam.

“Do you enjoy running Boyet’s?” she asks him, as she learns to make a cappuccino.

He pauses revising to smile at her. “Of course,” he replies, because despite the stress it causes him, it’s probably one of his greatest joys.

It’s not until after all of that that he realises he hasn’t seen the musician for a couple of weeks, and he feels oddly disappointed.

Fred receives another postcard from his father then, too, but he doesn’t open it until he has a break from coursework. It’s a picture of the Eiffel Tower, just a standard tourist postcard, and the words his father scrawled on it hurriedly speak a message of joyful abandon. He is happy, happy as he has always been, even when everything was fracturing around him. This time Fred doesn’t feel bad about it, though, because yesterday he saw his mother smile genuinely at a child in the street, and the night before that he had her over for dinner and she laughed with him over customer antics. His father deserves to be happy, wherever he is.

When he finally gets back to the café, he listens to the barista who insists on calling him “Vegan Fred” rant about ridiculous rules and sleeping in tents and considers offering his own flat if the issue isn’t solved soon. She shouldn’t have to sleep outside in the pouring rain because some overly stressed students are being stubborn. He watches her righteous anger and Kitso’s quiet withdrawal and stores it all away, because it is important, because details like this were the start of his parents’ divorce.

Then Rosa invites him to her brother’s birthday, and he finally meets the musician. He is sweet and shy and Fred realises that his crush is probably not one that’s going to go away soon, and Rosa laughs for longer than Zeb and offers him a beer when he tells her.

“I was right,” she says. “You are an idiot. And my _brother_ , oh my god”

“Mean.”

“You love me.” She sobers then, as much as she can after an hour at the party. “But, Fred, he…”

Fred shrugs. “I know,” he says, has heard the songs and the emotion behind them, seen the way he interacts with the flatmate he’s pretty sure is called Peter. He doesn’t expect anything from him, not for a silly unrequited crush born in snippets of songs not meant for him. “I just think he’s cool.”

Rosa grimaces. “We’re talking about my brother, here. I love him, but there’s only so much sappy rambling I can handle. Let’s go get drunk.”

He does, and doesn’t really remember what happened the next day, but he opens up the café on time and makes himself a quad shot to get through the day.

It is at that point that everything goes to hell, and Fred isn’t entirely sure why he’s the one trying to keep it all together. He lets two of his baristas and a friend use his spare rooms and pet his dog, and he can’t bring himself to begrudge them for it. He can see them worrying, the tension tangible in his flat, and he hopes that everything will be sorted out soon, because it’s hard enough when the café isn’t calm, when he isn’t calm. He doesn’t tell them that, and they don’t guess.

When Balthazar needs a place to stay, he just makes sure the other spare room is clean and wishes he was able to say no when it counted.

“I agree with Rosa,” Zeb says, patting him on the head without sympathy before their one shared lecture the next day. “Also, you’re a pushover.”

“I know,” Fred replies, squeezing his eyes shut.

His mother is of no help either, doing no more than holding him close and telling him that it’s not his responsibility to make everyone happy. She doesn’t understand any more than Zeb does.

He has no way of contacting his father anymore; he changed his email months ago and hasn’t been on Facebook in three weeks.

Instead, he keeps his new roommates busy and distracted and tries not to stare at Balthazar, because Balthazar is in love with a boy who loves him back, and that is something that he does not have yet.

“You really didn’t have to do this,” Balthazar tells him quietly, as they walk down the beach with brownies, the others at the café.

Fred Boyet shrugs. “It’s no problem,” he replies, and he thinks, I really did.

His father had always that Boyet’s one purpose is to make people happy.

He hopes that he’s enough.

 

**Author's Note:**

> Find me on [tumblr](http://www.peterdonalduck.tumblr.com).


End file.
